Gimmicks

You’ve heard of viral campaigns, but you probably haven’t encountered bacterial marketing – or, more specifically, a billboard crawling with live bacteria cultures. But that’s exactly what marketers from Warner Bros. Canada put together last week: not one, but two enormous, mounted petri dishes inoculated with cultures of penicillin, mold and pigmented bacteria. Over the course of the week, the cultures eventually grew to spell out CONTAGION, the title of the star-studded flick (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law) that hit theatres last week.